Synopsis by Unifrance: "Daniel Lefebvre heads a kindergarten in Hernaing, northern France. The son of a miner, he works in a once-affluent area that is now plagued by unemployment. Backed by a competent and devoted team of teachers, he encourages verbal and intellectual creativity among the children. One afternoon, a woman named Mme Henry arrives late to pick up her daughter. When bending over to kiss the child, she crumples in the school yard, dead drunk; overcome with embarrassment, she flees, leaving her little girl and her infant there. Daniel suddenly finds himself lumbered with the two kids." " En essayant coûte que coûte d'inventer une solidarité, de travailler en
équipe avec les assistantes sociales, les parents d'élèves, la mairie,
la PMI, il va se heurter au morcellement du système : chacun travaille
dans son coin. La guerre est déclarée et c'est toute sa vie d'homme et
d'enseignant qui est remise en question."

A magnificent and engrossing drama of social consciousness set in an école maternelle, a French kindergarten featuring a passionate and committed director fighting unfathomable deprivation. There is a great tradition of such drama in the French cinema, also including La Maternelle (1933), a masterpiece directed by Jean Benoît-Levy and Marie Epstein.

The circumstances are desperate because of daunting unemployment in a town which has lost its principal industry, the mining industry. But this film is about an unbroken spirit and a will to fight to the end. Clearly this is a labour of love for its makers, including Bertrand Tavernier and the leading actor, Philippe Torreton.

Conventional gender roles are reversed. Daniel (Torreton) works at the kindergarten in a "feminine" occupation. His partner Valéria (Maria Pitarresi) is a sculptor who welds and uses heavy tools in "masculine" fashion.

The premises are depressing, but the film is life-affirming in many ways. The spirit of the teachers is indomitable. The cinematography is ebullient with a particularly fresh and delightful colour palette. The children themselves are in the center, full of a joy of life. The children are the future, and the teachers are fighting for them. Towards the finale there is a fantastic party on the school yard, with a real orchestra, a huge installation with coloured bottles, Arab delicacies, and a dance. Even the film's title is a defiant motto of affirmation.

Which does not make us forget hunger, poverty, deprivation, alcoholism, domestic violence, suicides, collective suicides of families, disconnected landlines, and electricity shutdowns in winter of families with little children.

The bureaucracy at any level of the government is not helpful. There is an abyss of ignorance and negligence. The inspectors who pay fleeting visits are out of their depth. Budgets are woefully insufficient.

The issues are topical in Finland, too. We had a political strike of the early childhood educators of the province of Uusimaa on 25 April. They are underpaid and understaffed.

We learn that Daniel himself has been a victim of domestic violence in childhood. He has outgrown the revenge principle and turned into a man who fights abuse and deprivation of any kind. He still works at a reconciliation with his embittered father, and a beautiful text written by him moves his parents in the finale.

Also Valéria's son carries a grudge and finds it hard to understand that his father had dumped Valéria when she became a teenage mother. It is tough for him to realize that his father left Valéria because of him. Only when he understands Daniel's tragedy with his own father he starts to accept Daniel.

The film is rich and dense, based on short scenes and rapid cutting. It will benefit from multiple viewings.

Ça commence aujourd’hui can be seen as a coda to Émile Zola's Germinal (1885) which has been memorably filmed several times (by Ferdinand Zecca, 1903, Albert Capellani, 1913, Yves Allégret, 1963, and Claude Berri, 1993, among others).

A particularly brilliant print with a fresh colour scale. I wondered if it might be possible that it has been struck from the original negative. Anyway it looks wonderful. This print runs 119 min.

I saw for the first time La donna scimmia, a story of itinerant variety show performers who hit the big time and become a cabaret attraction at Montmartre.

The struggling male protagonist Antonio Focaccia [focaccia means Italian flat bread] discovers a hairy nun, Maria, and creates a touring spectacle around her as "an ape woman", performing himself as an African explorer who has captured her in the jungle. Maria is chaste and does not want spectators to touch her. They meet a professor, but Maria refuses to undress for him, and she also refuses the professor's offer to stay for three days "for study" at a compensation of 100 000 Lire.

The mother superior condemns Antonio who would like to adopt Maria. "How many old men come to adopt girls of 14, 15... " The condition for releasing Maria is that Focaccia must marry her.

The tale of a ruthless small-time showman and an inexperienced, exploited woman shares its basic concept with Federico Fellini's La strada but is otherwise completely different.

La donna scimmia is a story of abuse and exploitation, but is also a story of mutual affection, and perhaps love. The wedding sequence is moving and spectacular: the wedding procession attracts a huge crowd of spectators on the street.

Zampanò in La strada was a sexual brute but Focaccia has little interest in sex ("I love you like a brother loves a sister"). In fact, it is Maria who seduces him and wants to have a baby with him. By the time they reach Montmartre they present quite an erotic show with sensual dancing and see-through nudity, but this seems to happen on Maria's terms.

The pregnancy is calamitous, and despite doctors' warnings Maria refuses an abortion. Antonio is shattered when both mother and baby die at the maternity ward.

At first Antonio deposits the corpses with the Natural History Museum, but he returns to retrieve the mummies to continue his La donna scimmia tour with them.

Although Ferreri's approach is original, he shares with La strada a neorealistic inspiration combined with a taste for the extraordinary in a spectacle. The location shooting is powerful, and the movie is full of juicy and wonderful characters down to bit parts. There is still a sense of spontaneity, impulsiveness and vitality in the way of life on display.

Wonderful scenes include one at the zoo which Antonio and Maria visit to observe and imitate a chimpanzee. They are evicted when the chimpanzee becomes irritated by them.

For me, La donna scimmia represents Marco Ferreri at his best. I learned to know him by his big international hit period (La grande bouffe, Touche pas à la femme blanche, La dernière femme, Storie di ordinaria follia); those films are impressive, yet also slightly shallow. I have also seen Ferreri's early Spanish films: the remarkable El pisito and also Los chicos and El cochecito, which are admirable, but inevitably Franco era censorship was constraining for the wild talents of Ferreri and his screenwriter Rafael Azcona.

Watching La donna scimmia I feel like for the first time seeing the true Ferreri, and look forward to seeing his other Italian films of the 1960s, from L'ape regina (Queen Bee) to Dillinger è morto which was a favourite of Peter von Bagh.

Ferreri's key collaborator, also in La donna scimmia, was his screenwriter Rafael Azcona with whom he made 14 films in all periods of his career (Spanish, Italian, international). They shared a taste for the absurd and an approach of satire. El pisito was their mutual breakthrough film.

This is a solid production by Carlo Ponti who was also a co-producer in La strada. There is also a special Luchino Visconti connection in the production team which includes Visconti's art director Mario Garbuglia, his costume designer Piero Tosi, and his editor Mario Serandrei. Another formidable veteran is the brilliant cinematographer Aldo Tonti whose CV includes collaborations from Rossellini to Huston, not forgetting Fellini's Le notti di Cabiria.

Among the veterans is also the actor Achille Majeroni who had started his film career before WWI and whose last film La donna scimmia was. He is best remembered from Fellini's I vitelloni.

The composer is Teo Usuelli who started his film career in Ferreri's L'ape regina and composed seven films for him. There is an affinity with Nino Rota in the circus ambience that launches the film, but Usuelli has a sound world of his own, covering everything from the sacred to the mundane.

La Girardot. A key Visconti connection is the performer of the ape woman herself: Annie Girardot, who is at first almost unrecognizable here. I last saw Girardot in Mourir d'aimer (1971) and it took me a while to accept that this is the same actress. Girardot had, in fact, started her career as a performer in the cabarets of Montmartre. She progressed to La Comédie-Française, and Luchino Visconti cast her in a theatre role and then in Rocco e i suoi fratelli. During its filming Girardot fell in love with Renato Salvatori whom she married and with whom she had a baby. Thus started the Italian current in Girardot's work, including three films for Ferreri, of which La donna scimmia was the first. Girardot's performance as Maria is unique and deeply moving. The implications are deep and relevant to philosophical questions of appearance and essence. And humanity and otherness.

Ugo Tognazzi became a Marco Ferreri regular starting with Ferreri's first Italian film, L'ape regina; they did ten films together. Tognazzi, a mainstay of commedia all'italiana, is usually a satirical genius, an incarnation of insincerity. Also La donna scimmia builds on this very basis, but Tognazzi creates a complex and unpredictable performance on it.

On display was the uncensored Italian version which ran 92 minutes. A used print which breathed and conveyed a sense of the original visual health of the movie. A print struck from the original negative or not too far removed from it.

I confess I suffer from a fatigue of crime fiction, including Nordic Noir, with serial killings and fancy murders. Real-life crime has little to do with such fiction. Truly epic crimes are cases of fraud in the world of financial speculation, of a magnitude the world has never seen. The biggest criminals are careful not to get involved with violence. Even professional burglars never carry a weapon.

L'Appât is a true life story of young and marginalized amateur criminals. There is nothing fancy in this tale, but it is deeply moving and conveyed with genuine feeling for both the criminals and their victims by maestro Bertrand Tavernier. It is a work rich in implications of the social psychology of crime.

The criminal trio consists of Eric (Olivier Sitruk), Bruno (Bruno Putzulu), and Nathalie (Marie Gillain) . Eric is a son from a wealthy home, but his father has cancelled his checkbook because Eric has no sense of money. Bruno is an orphan, reportedly found as a baby in a shopping cart. Nathalie is from a good and loving home, and she has a nice job, but in the evenings she is active as an escort (providing company only, but apparently no sex). The desperate duo, Eric and Bruno, get the idea to consult Nathalie's book of her regular clients (she is usually the one who calls them) and use Nathalie both as a bait and a Troyan horse helping them to get in and commit robbery. The result is a disaster. The clients have ingenious security systems. Nobody keeps at home money or such valuables that can be easily cashed into money. Bruno is a loose cannon, and Bruno and Eric end up brutally murdering two victims. They end up with a minimal catch and maximal culpability.

The performances feel true to life. The characters are interesting and surprising. For instance Bruno is the more tender one of the guys. He is the one who defends Nathalie from Eric's violence. Everyone is a part of a materialistic world. There is not much spirituality in evidence.

The film is full of interesting scenes and observations. In the beginning Nathalie and her best girlfriend laugh at the sex polls of a magazine. There is a quarrel at home concerning the use of the remote control. Bruno watches television quiz shows which support his sense that wealth is not earned. At their victims' homes Bruno marvels at cases of conspicuous consumption such as a cinema-size television screen.

Sexual harassment is ubiquitous. The female viewpoint is strong. Nathalie has to be permanently vigilant, even against rape attempts and domestic violence.

There is a Jewish angle in the final robbery tragedy. Alain (Richard Berry) senses correctly that Eric is Jewish like he. The attempt at bonding does not save Alain, nor Eric from himself.

The references to popular culture seem to indicate that films such as Brian DePalma's Scarface contribute to demoralization and soullessness, as well as music videos. I'm not sure that Peter Gabriel is a good example to illustrate the detrimental aspect of the music video.

There is a sense of convincing realism in the police investigations.

L'Appât is an original contribution to accounts of an age ruled by the spirit of instant gratification.

Based on the novel by Alissa Walser, Barbara Albert's Licht / Mademoiselle Paradis is a historical drama, a biopic about the Austrian composer, virtuoso pianist and musical Wunderkind Maria Theresia von Paradis, a contemporary of Haydn and Mozart. In early childhood she lost her eyesight.

We meet her at age 18 when she is brought for treatment to Franz Anton Mesmer, the physician after whom the word "mesmerizing" was coined. Mesmer believed in animal magnetism, a natural energetic transference between objects. Widely dismissed as a charlatan, Mesmer was parodied in Mozart's Così fan tutte. Yet Mesmer's practices were an inspiration for the development of hypnosis, studies of somnambulism, and the birth of psychoanalysis. An affinity has been observed with Chinese medicine based on the principle of the vital energy called qi.

Licht / Mademoiselle Paradis is a drama about the meeting of two exceptional minds, Paradis and Mesmer. The viewpoint of Walser and Albert is not satirical or parodical. Mesmer is not a charlatan but a kind and patient healer. In fact, he manages to help Paradis regain her eyesight. But at the same time she starts to lose her genius in music. When her father takes her home again she loses her eyesight again but regains her piano virtuosity.

The irony of the film is in the fact that there is not much worth seeing for Paradis. Having regained her eyesight she is disappointed at how people look. The period look of the Rococo film is strong. Instead of targeting Mesmer, Walser and Albert satirize the world he lives in, a world of artifice, prejudice, narrow-mindedness, and big wigs. It is also a world of patriarchy. There is little love lost between Maria Theresa von Paradis and her father.

Licht / Mademoiselle Paradis is an intriguing film about a woman's struggle against patriarchy and a doctor's fight against prejudice.

It also raises philosophical questions about seeing and hearing. And light itself.

A major historical drama, a key story about the freedom of the press, one of the finest newspaper movies, a great tale about America, an essential feminist film.

Written by Liz Hannah who was inspired by the memoirs of Katharine Graham (Personal History, 1997). Her collaborator was a more experienced screenwriter, Josh Singer, the scenarist of The Fifth Estate (2013, on WikiLeaks) and Spotlight (2014, on the Boston Globe's exposure of the Boston Catholic priests' pedophilia tragedy). The powerful screenplay is strong on suspense based purely on the facts of the matter. We learn private aspects of the protagonists, but the tensions rise solely from the Pentagon Papers case.

Steven Spielberg has for a long time alternated between serious historical subjects and spectacles of popular entertainment. In The Post he is at his best. In some of his serious works there has been a slight tendency to prolong discourse, but The Post is taut and brisk, executed with a perfect sense of rhythm.

Among the films with which The Post is compared is naturally Alan Pakula's All the President's Men (1974) with which it shares a protagonist, Ben Bradlee, played in Pakula's film by Jason Robards.

The Post is very different from Pakula's noirish classic of Nixon-era paranoia. The Post is more sunny, more family-centered. There is a family atmosphere even in the Washington Post newsroom. The family focus provides a major point of conflict, too. Katharine Graham and Ben Bradlee have become family friends of presidents, and Robert McNamara is Katharine Graham's mentor. Now it turns out that he has been lying blatantly to everybody about America's involvement in Vietnam. The conflict is the greatest possible for the newspaperwoman.

This is very strong stuff, and Meryl Streep and Tom Hanks rise to the occasion magnificently, both doing some of their best work.

The Post resonates powerfully in the age of Donald Trump, President of the United States since 2017. Freedom and authority can never be taken for granted.

A very special and highly moving accent in the movie is the feminist angle. Katharine Graham was the first female publisher of a major American newspaper. In this film we observe her being systematically underrated and disparaged. But against the judgement of all the other members of her (otherwise all male) board she makes the decision to run the story of the Pentagon papers.

In the court battle of the press versus the White House the Supreme Court rules in the newspapers' favour. When Graham emerges from the court, she is surrounded by women who look at her in silent admiration. There was a special charged intensity in the atmosphere of the cinema, too, during this sequence.

The cinematography of Janusz Kaminski is very different from Gordon Willis in All the President's Men. The feeling of warmth is palpable. There is also a slight feeling of digital airbrushing in the photography of Meryl Streep and Tom Hanks, a sense of them being between real people and animated characters. I guess I would prefer gritty 1970s aesthetics.

The score of John Williams is the work of a master. Maybe a little less would be more. Dramatic highlights may be more effective played without background music.

The film starts in medias res with a scene in Vietnam, with Daniel Ellsberg on a Pentagon mission for Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara. There is no credit sequence in the beginning. The sound starts immediately with "Green River" by Creedence Clearwater Revival, my favourite CCR track and a favourite song of mine of all times; for me, the track was so strong that it threw the movie off balance at first. The obvious choice would have been "Fortunate Son", or perhaps "Run Through the Jungle" (which, however, is not a Vietnam song: "200 million guns are loaded" refers to the weapons that the homes of America possess). But "Green River" is there for contrast: the bucolic ideal of American youth instead of the meaningless hell of Vietnam.

Significantly, the narrative of The Post is a corrective to "Fortunate Son" ("some folks are born silver spoon in hand"). Even Katharine Graham's son Donald served in Vietnam. The Pentagon Papers' revelation that we knew that the war would be lost was very personal history for Katharine Graham.

NB. 10 May 2018. Today I was thinking about The Post and was
in tears. I was thinking about my mother Anneli Alanen (1928–2015), a registered nurse who
was an activist in road traffic security planning, also an environmentalist and "green traffic" pioneer. She sat
in several committees and boards, usually as the only woman in an
otherwise all male panel. She was also the only representative of the silent majority of pedestrians, cyclists and other users of light traffic. A systematic underestimating of women was her daily experience. What she fought for is now generally accepted.

I saw for the first time A ciascuno il suo, a major film by Elio Petri, the great Italian political film-maker.

It was the first film based on a novel by Leonardo Sciascia, novelist and politician, who was among other things a Member of the European Parliament for Southern Italy. Later Sciascia film adaptations include Il giorno della civetta (1968), Cadaveri eccellenti (1976), Todo modo (1976), Porte aperte (1990), and Una storia semplice (1991).

It was also Petri's first collaboration with the great screenwriter Ugo Pirro who would also write for him Indagine su un cittadino al di sopra di ogni sospetto (1970), La classe operaia va in paradiso (1972), and La proprietà non è più un furto (1973).

A ciascuno il suo is one of the best films of the Sicilian mafia, a theme that features prominently in today's news. ("A court in Italy convicted a mob boss, three police investigators and a close associate of former Premier Silvio Berlusconi in a case showing collusion between the Sicilian Mafia and state institutions after a deadly wave of mafia bombings during the early 1990s." The Associated Press, 20 April 2018, as published in The New York Times).

This is the story of a devious conspiracy in Palermo which a well-meaning teacher (Volontè) tries to expose. Nothing is what it seems, not even the budding romantic interest of the beautiful widow Luisa Roscio (Irene Papas).

Beyond political immediacy there is a Kafkaesque existential dimension in Petri's oeuvre. A nightmare lurks beyond the sunny facade of this film which ends with a splendid wedding ceremony of Luisa and the attorney Rosello (Gabriele Ferzetti), the very person who had ordered the hit in which Luisa's husband was assassinated.

A ciascuno il suo was also the breakthrough film for the great cinematographer Luigi Kuveiller who had been an operator for Aldo Scavarda in L'avventura (1960) and who would become the DP of Profondo rosso, among many other films. Here Kuveiller captures impressively the pervasive sense of menace under the glowing sun of Sicily.

The composer Luis Bacalov (1933–2017) creates a stirring and original score in idioms familiar from contemporary Italian thrillers and Westerns. The score has been published and re-released as a soundtrack album: A ciascuno il suo (Colonna sonora originale, un film di Elio Petri, 1968, 2011), best known by the song "Rêvé pour l'hiver" to the poem by Arthur Rimbaud (see beyond the jump break).

I am slightly disappointed with what I perceive as a spirit of defeatism in this film.

The original Technicolor is lush and authentic in the vintage print. There are joins and scratches in the heads and tails of the reels, but otherwise the visual quality is great. This print runs 93 min.

PLOT SUMMARY OF THE LEONARDO SCIASCIA NOVEL FROM ENGLISH WIKIPEDIA AND DATA ABOUT THE MOVIE FROM ITALIAN WIKIPEDIA:

It's Only Money. Parallel parking the Jerry Lewis way. In Finland we call this "pocket parking".

It's Only Money. Hiding under the bed of Wanda Paxton (Joan O'Brien) Lester (Jerry Lewis) snores so loudly that he wakes up the millionaire heiress, and Wanda has to pretend that she is the one who is doing the snoring.

Frank Tashlin at his grimmest. It's Only Money is a thriller spoof about a crooked lawyer, Gregory DeWitt (Zachary Scott in his last film role) who has targeted a heiress, Cecilia Albright (Mae Questel*) whom he is about to marry. She is the daughter of an eccentric millionaire and television inventor whose giant bearded portrait dominates the hall of the family mansion. Gregory DeWitt and his accomplice, the butler Leopold (Jack Weston) are spinning their web for Cecilia.

But there is a case of a missing son, and when a television repairman, the orphan Lester March (Jerry Lewis), turns up, his voice and looks are instantly recognized. With the exception of the magnificent beard Lester is, in fact, a dead ringer for the deceased patriach.

Lester is both a walking disaster and an instinctive genius in electronics, and It's Only Money delivers generous helpings of sight gags and loony expressions.

There are also more serious sequences such as the one where the plump Cecilia is busy doing yoga exercises on her square-paneled marble floor in order to fit her bridal gown while her cold-blooded fiancé is examining her from above, preparing to murder her after the wedding.

Most of the comic thrills are about the two crooks' outlandish attempts to dispose of Lester. There is a time bomb hidden inside a television set in a yacht. The crooks even turn remote controlled lawn mowers into murder weapons.

W. Wallace Kelley, who shot most of Jerry Lewis's films in the 1960s, adopts here a thriller mood in the visuals, shooting in black and white.

An equally important regular collaborator for Lewis during the same period was the composer Walter Scharf whose work for Harold Lloyd's re-releases Lewis had admired. Scharf excelled in composing dramatic music with comic touches. In It's Only Money Scharf creates an effective thriller score.

The theme of the satire is announced in the title. We laugh at a life where money has turned from servant to master. It's Only Money is an original contribution to a great tradition dating back to Herodotus's account of Croesus, King of Lydia. It is one of the blackest comedies by Tashlin and Lewis.

A used print with signs of wear in the heads and tails of the reels. Beneath the patina the fundamental visual health is good.

* The casts of Jerry Lewis's movies are an impressive display of American show business heritage. Mae Questel debuted in the 1930s as the voice of Betty Boop and Olive Oyl, and she went on until Who Framed Roger Rabbit?

Thursday, April 12, 2018

The Patsy (1964). Singing lesson: Jerry Lewis (Stanley Belt) and Hans Conried (Prof. Mulerr). The ultrasonic yell of the Professor whose fingers have been stuck under the lid of the piano. From Ways of Seeing.

The Patsy, one of Jerry Lewis's greatest films, was his penultimate production for Paramount Pictures and already a kind of a farewell to the studio.

Martin and Lewis had started at Paramount in 1949 with My Friend Irma, and when Lewis debuted as a director in 1960 he became the last new genius director of the Hollywood studio system. Lewis's films were pronouncedly Paramount creations: artificial paradises, fantasies with affinities with the musical comedy idiom.

They were spectacular, glamorous, in Technicolor, and based on Paramount studio expertise in all departments: costumes, sets, visual effects, cinematography. Lewis respected studio veterans and was happy to engage Hollywood old-timers to the max in the cast. The Lewis paradox is that his films are late blossoms of the studio system yet modernist in ways comparable with Godard and Tati.

Many of Lewis's films, such as The Ladies' Man, are gag-driven, but The Patsy is plot-driven. A big star dies in a plane crash, and his brain trust decides to make a new star of a nobody – Jerry Lewis as bellboy Stanley.

The plot is about the manufacturing of a star, a variation and a parody of the Pygmalion narrative with Jerry as Galatea and American show business as Pygmalion. Tailoring, coiffure, singing lessons, step dance exercises, and classical dancing are among the episodes, all ripe with gag possibilities. With his brain trust, Stanley tries hard to learn jokes and comic routines. At each stage it becomes clearer that he is devoid of talent.

No better are his appearances at cocktail parties and public relations events. When he is told to be humble he crawls like a slave and licks a hand like a dog. When he is asked to relax he becomes totally limp. Unsure of what is wanted of him he becomes totally cramped. His awkward presence turns these events into such parodies of their inherent phoniness that they become entertaining to veterans such as Hedda Hopper.

When Stanley who is tone deaf, without musical talent and a singing voice is asked to lip-synch a rock'n'roll hit song written for him ("I Lost My Heart in a Drive-In Movie") he botches even that. As a performer Stanley is a walking disaster.

During these soulless proceedings only one person is interested in Stanley as a human being: Ellen Betz (Ina Balin), the secretary of the brain trust. In the middle of the noisy and trivial pop world there is a silent (dialogueless) flashback to Stanley's teenage days, his humiliating memories from a school dance when he first met Ellen. Ellen is given the most profound words of the film: "The sweet things and the good things aren't always the things that make us better people. I think the heartaches and unpleasant things, even the heavy burdens we've had placed upon us, make us stronger in the long run." The performances in this scene make it a privileged moment, a center of gravity.

The jokes written for Stanley play with the theme of identity ("I'd like to introduce myself... but I don't know me either"). The pathos, the fear of failure, and the nightmare of losing identity are treated in ways that border on horror and with an acute sense of the uncanny. There is an affinity with the world of Andy Kaufman as interpreted by Jim Carrey in Man on the Moon, directed by Milos Forman (who died 13 April 2018).

The narrative is obviously taking us towards a final catastrophe but the film-makers lack the courage of their convictions, and instead there is a fairy-tale happy ending (Stanley turns out to be an exceptionally talented star in the Ed Sullivan Show) and a meta-filmic "it's only a movie" ending (everything has happened on a studio stage). These endings water the film down.

The film is well cast. Jill St. John (Who's Minding the Store?) and Ina Balin belong to Jerry Lewis's most attractive female leads. It's not only that they are lovely to look at. They seem to be able to truly respond to Jerry and see through his clown masquerade. They are like Edna Purviance, Charles Chaplin's most durable partner in many of his best films: a center of sanity and a gifted comedienne radiating a more subtle sense of humour than Mr. Clown himself.

Jerry Lewis never imitated his models but there are affinities and connections to his favourite ones. The name Stanley is yet another hommage to Lewis's friend and mentor Stan Laurel. The awkward sequences with clothes (the tailor sequence, the school dance, and the tuxedo sketch) have echoes of Harold Lloyd's Fall Frolic sequence in The Freshman. And there is the fundamental affinity with Charles Chaplin, the cosmic solitude, the sense of rejection, and the sense of being an alien trying to accommodate into a strange world. (The ultimate Pygmalion narrative. And the story of every human being, born into this strange world as a baby.)

Bright Technicolor in a very good print in which only the beginning seems slightly duped and fading.

The Night Before Christmas is the earliest surviving feature film by Wladyslaw Starewicz. The artist and entomologist had for a few years ago emerged as a prolific and versatile film-maker at the Khanzhonkov studios – as animator, art director, cinematographer, screenwriter and director. All those skills are on display in The Night Before Christmas, a weird adaptation of a work of youth, Evenings on a Farm Near Dikanka, by Nikolai Gogol, based on Ukrainian folklore, fairytales and horror stories. Even Starewicz's first live action film, Strachnaya mest / A Terrible Vengeance, made the year before, had been based on the Dikanka tales.

The star of both A Terrible Vengeance and The Night Before Christmas is none other than Ivan Mozzhukhin, the greatest Russian actor of the 1910s and the 1920s. He incarnated memorably characters of Russian classics (Pushkin, Tolstoy, Dostoevsky) and was able to cover decadence and lyricism, comedy and tragedy.

Mozzhukhin is unrecognizable as Starewicz's Devil. He never made a crazier interpretation than as the Devil who makes uninhibited love to the village witch Solokha (see image above) and steals the Moon from the sky. The performance was probably influenced by Georges Méliès, and I suspect that Benjamin Christensen, who played the Devil in Häxan, must have seen Mozzhukhin's performance because of striking similarities in details.

Mozzhukhin's is not the best performance in this film, and he fails to convey the Devil with the same panache as Méliès. There is a genuine ensemble spirit in the village fantasy with colourful and humoristic characters.

More uncanny than Mozzhukhin's Devil is the Zaporochian Cossack Patsyuk who is believed to be in league with the Devil.

The blacksmith Vakula is a funny premier. He is rejected by Oksana who insists in being presented the Czarina's cherevichki slippers as a condition for accepting his proposal. With the help of the Devil even this preposterous demand can be fulfilled. But by then Oksana is already prepared to accept Vakula unconditionally.

The women are sensual and original, starting with Lidiya Tridenskaya as Solokha (see image above) whom no man can resist and who has to hide a growing queue of male visitors in flour sacks. Olga Obolenskaya is attractive as Oksana, a young woman of independent spirit.

There are living portrait credit titles. Masks and vignettes are in use. Interestingly for an animation wizard the flight sequences are clumsily performed, more clumsily than earlier efforts by Méliès and R. W. Paul. The films starts unpromisingly but soon a good fantastic-humoristic flow emerges. There are two pioneering scenes of animation combined with live action. In one varenyky dumplings are galloping into mouths (in a scene with affinities with Aleksander Medvedkin's Happiness). In another one, at Empress Catherine's court, the Devil shrinks to pocket size.

The story takes place on Christmas Eve, but there is no religious content. I believe this secularity stems from Gogol's original but even if it wouldn't there was a ban on the representation of the Church in the cinema of the Russian empire. The first men of the church in Russian cinema appeared only after the fall of the Romanov empire, in films such as Yakov Protazanov's Father Sergius (produced in 1917, released in 1918). There was also a ban on the representation of the Romanov family which is why Catherine the Great is omitted and we see Prince Potemkin presenting Vakula the Empress's cherevichki.

Mostly the visual quality is good, including in interesting sequences of depth staging. The beginning has been copied from battered material. The movement is smooth and natural at 16 fps.

Frank Tashlin and Jerry Lewis are at their best in this penultimate collaboration of theirs (they made eight films together). Who's Minding the Store? is one of the great department store comedies, to be compared with The Floorwalker by Charles Chaplin, Safety Last! by Harold Lloyd and The Big Store by the Marx Brothers. With carefree abandon Tashlin shapes a satire of the consumer society of the 1960s. The points remain topical although the department store phenomenon is in decline in the age of online shopping.

The film is gag-driven, but the plot is more than nominal now. The heiress of the department store dynasty, Barbara Tuttle (Jill St. John), wants nothing to do with her mother Phoebe (Agnes Moorehead), who runs the family empire with an iron hand. Barbara wants to marry a man who loves her for herself, not for her money, and she has found him in Norman Phiffier (Jerry Lewis). Phoebe engages detectives who discover in Norman a man who cannot hold a job (the highest achievements on his CV have been as a dog walker and animal sitter). Hidden camera footage reveals a man whose table manners remain on the infant level.

Because Barbara is working incognito at the department store as an elevator assistant, Phoebe decides to engage Norman there, as well: "give him every dumb job you have". The intention is to have Norman irreversibly humiliated in front of Barbara's eyes.

Norman starts in the mailroom and proceeds to paint flagpoles. Gag opportunities appear at the ladies' shoe department (with a lady wrestler as a customer), at the timecard machine, and with ingeniously masked shoplifters. At the gourmet department Jerry gets acquainted with delicacies such as roasted grasshoppers and toasted black ants, and at a clothes sale he faces a stampede of customers who rip him of his clothes. He has to perform a tie-in of selling both a mattress and a huge tv receiver to be installed in the ceiling. Of topical relevance in today's debates is the gun department sequence where Jerry serves a big game hunter, Emily Rothgraber (Nancy Kulp) who is looking for an elephant gun. Jerry accidentally fires the elephant gun, and by force of its recoil careens through the building with catastrophic results. Another catastrophe sequence is the mirror episode: when Jerry carries a giant mirror into a van its reflections cause a multiple traffic collision. The earliest catastrophe has taken place at the golf department where Jerry demonstrates the Futurascope Fairway golf simulation device.

The catastrophe scenario is a link to the earliest stage of screen comedy around 1900 when Méliès, Cretinetti, R. W. Paul, and others established the trend, later followed by Mack Sennett and other founders of American film comedy. In Tashlin's film the store building remains intact, but entire departments are demolished, and traffic pile-ups become endemic as soon as Jerry is let loose.

An early gag sequence, "The Typewriter" (see image above), is a music-driven pantomime to Leroy Anderson's popular tune. The setpiece can be compared with Charles Chaplin's barbershop performance to Brahms's Hungarian Dance No. 5 in The Great Dictator. Funny in itself, "The Typewriter" can also be seen as a satire on simulating work. Apparently Lewis himself could be a pedantic boss who fired Mel Brooks from the production of The Ladies' Man when Lewis did not hear Brooks's typewriter humming from 9 to 5.

The following sequence, "The Flagpole", can be compared with Harold Lloyd's Safety Last. The comedy is built on the fear of heights, acrophobia, and vertigo, and there is a natural metaphorical dimension. Both Harold and Jerry start from the bottom and are on their way to the top. We are made to laugh at the idea of climbing and the nightmare of falling.

The climax is the vacuum cleaner sequence. (The device is called Waste King Universal Disposal). Jerry rewires the criss-crossed lines of a customer's vacuum cleaner with the result that it becomes supercharged. Jewels, toasts, ties, mugs, floor tiles, shoes, and corsets fly into its mouth, as well as the customer's poodle. The bag inflates into a giant balloon which rises to the ceiling. Jerry climbs onto the top of a ladder to cut it and release the poodle. The balloon explodes, and the debris fills the department.

Again, the sequence harks back to the earliest film comedies where the world was expected to perish utterly. But the catastrophe and traffic jam themes also anticipate Godard and Tati, as well as the finale of Antonioni's Zabriskie Point. Like Donald Duck, Jerry Lewis has the strange distinction of being either a walking catastrophe or a virtuoso of some special skill, and sometimes both, as when he is displaying his golf bravado at the Futurascope Fairway.

In Who's Minding the Store? Jerry Lewis is in top form in physical comedy. As soon as he has been promised the opportunity of "room at the top, and lots of raises" he gives a hilarious parody of "a brisk walk". One of his ordeals is to perform for the sports department at the show window. When he performs a marathon, running around the block, his slowed down jog and stagger are brilliant comic studies of the essence of those actions.

In The Ladies' Man Lewis adopted qualities of the monkey. In Who's Minding the Store? the key animal is the dog. Lewis is not only a dog walker but also a perfect dog sitter who identifies with pets. He even knows how to deal with bobtailers. At the finale of his marathon ordeal he almost becomes a dog himself, lapping water like one. Lewis's transformations are smooth and seamless. His presence is like quicksilver.

To everyone's surprise Norman shows character in his ordeals. He is never discouraged but willing to learn. He becomes the best friend of John P. Tuttle (John McGiver), Barbara's father, without knowing who he is. He is even let in the family secret: it is a matriarchy run by the ladies of the house. "All the Tuttle women have married boobs" who change their names into Tuttle at marriage. John is a man constantly excusing his existence ("our house has never been a home"), and his only activity is golf at the office room. When Barbara announces her wedding plans to her mother she wishes for only one wedding present: "disinherit me". At the vacuum cleaner catastrophe climax (see image above) the identities are revealed, and Jerry quits the Tuttles at once since he does not want to marry money. But that is the final proof of character. In the finale all four are seen walking dogs, and around the corner there is the biggest crash of a multiple collision. Everybody is hugging.

It would be interesting to read a feminist study on Who's Minding the Store? There is a chauvinist "boss chasing a secretary" and "secretary chasing a boss" agenda, similar to Mad Men narratives. Beyond the teasing surface there is a matriarchal foundation: the universe is in reality ruled by the formidable mother. (I am even thinking about The Manchurian Candidate, released the year before). And the film is peopled with funny ladies who are often stronger than men such as the lady wrestler and the female big game hunter.

Who's Minding the Store? is a Jerry Lewis comedy but Frank Tashlin directs a strong cast (see again the image above). John McGiver was a fine actor whom we remember for instance as the debonair Tiffany salesman in Breakfast at Tiffany's. Agnes Moorehead had been introduced to the cinema by Orson Welles; here she displays talent in hilarious comedy. Jill St. John is still active, and she has made films in eight decades. Portrayed by her, Barbara is not just a pretty girl but a woman of character whom we
can believe to become the next CEO of the department store empire.

Jerry Lewis gives a brilliant performance, and Frank Tashlin is to be credited with the fine ensemble work and the satirical bite. As well as the abandon in the hyperbole which often takes us to the impossible like Tashlin's animations and cartoons.

I like the sense of humour in this film. We are not laughing at these people; we are laughing with them and at ourselves. We are all victims of our urges and circumstances. The satire of conspicuous consumption is no less urgent today when we are aware of climate change, the ecocatastrophe, and our drowning into our own garbage, not least in the plastic cesspools of the ocean. Waste King Universal Disposal, yes. Who's minding the store, indeed.

The more I think about Jerry Lewis the more I'm impressed by the metaphysical and eternal in his performances. In my remarks on The Ladies' Man I claimed that with Jerry we laugh at the human condition (walking, talking, looking, thinking, expressing), at mimesis, even at being itself. Like Charles Chaplin, Jerry Lewis emerges like a creature from outer space who tries to give impressions and imitations of humanity (and even of life and of being in general). In Who's Minding the Store? targets would also include family, work, service, money, commerce, exchange... and society, and the world order?

Of great comedians such as Charles Chaplin and Marilyn Monroe it has been said that they always preserve their dignity no matter how ridiculous their predicaments. Of Jerry Lewis I'm not sure if the word "dignity" is apt. I sense something more atavistic. There is a current of energy, a life-force, an irrepressible joy of life, an innate sense of fun. In that dimension he can connect directly with a juvenile, a baby, a wild being, an animal. Yes, even a dog in the best sense of a dog being an incarnation of joy and friendliness.

The quality of the colour on the print is fair at first, good for the rest. The print is peculiar, like a carefully cropped, Academy-formatted television print which somehow went into theatrical distribution. Quite watchable but does not do full justice to the mise-en-scène.

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About Me

Antti Alanen (born 1955) is Film Programmer at National Audiovisual Institute (Finland), which runs the Cinema Orion in Helsinki. This diary is an irregular notebook and scrapbook of rough notes on films and related matters.

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